We were pretty sure words had meaning. Turns out they are signs pointing to more signs, and the semantic cargo we ferried across with our words is no longer unassailable. We were pretty sure we knew about history. Turns out that stringing together documents and evidence is an act of narration no different than writing a detective novel. We thought we could write something new. Turns out the only new things left are the old things invoked ironically. We thought science would save us. Turns out we can't determine the position and momentum of a single electron. Everywhere we turn we're faced with disillusionment, things have lost cohesiveness, and transcendent, universal meaning is out of the question. The vulgarity of postmodernism is the middle finger of a disturbed teenager. It's the cheap woman that the middle aged man reaches out for in his crisis. It's the wrist slicing of a deeply depressed person. The solution is learning to fully validate freeplay and irreverence by seeing it as part of a process, as part of a self-correcting system that celebrates provisionality, but is not paralyzed because of uncertainty. The solution is ethics -- learning how to listen to each other without violence, yet remaining differentiated enough to engage in a dialectic. The solution is hope. Large, heaping, "pressed down and overflowing" portions of hope.
Agree/Disagree?
If in agreement, what forms does hope take? How do we "do" hope?
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4 comments:
I'm reading. I don't think I'm up for commenting, though. Yet.
glad to hear someone's reading this drivel ;)
Agree.
And hope, to me, is the same as kindness and generosity. We are kind to people over and over again, whether or not they deserve it in that moment, in the hope that they will remember that kindness and deserve it in the future. That one day, they will do the "right" thing, take care of the planet, their families, the animals, strangers, the world. I like hope. Hope is good.
My view of hope: Relinquishing of old forms of reality and the acceptance of the multiplicity of realities that are amongst us. It is the realization that change is possible, and often times warrants us to become participants in it. This is respectful dialogue. This can help us grieve the old and embrace the new, constantly and hopefully. An example would be found in President Obama's speech that he delivered in Cairo, Egypt today. I think it was submerged with Chrissy's philosophy.
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